Me Candido! Book

THE STORY: ME, CANDIDO! is the defiant battlecry of a homeless eleven-year-old shoeshine boy, who is unofficially adopted by Papa Gomez, a poor Puerto Rican with a large family recently arrived in New York; by truculent old Mr. Ramirez, proprietor of a restaurant locally known as The Garbage Pail ; by Mike McGinty, an eloquent and thirsty ex-longshoreman; and by Yetta Rosenbloom, a lonely old woman whose family has drifted away from her. But the simple, kindly act of taking a boy in from the street comes up against the red tape of officialdom. Candido can't work in The Garbage Pail ; he must go to school; he can't go to school till he has been legally adopted. They need a lawyer - for free; money is for rice and beans. But Candido is a boy, not a case history, and his fathers are determined to keep him out of an institution. The law does not concern itself with love. But the neighbors do, and the struggle spreads to the entire neighborhood. Candido becomes a cause celebre. Amid humorous entanglements, the situation is at last resolved in a poignant and moving scene in the courtroom. It is an absorbing drama, solid, vigorous, fresh. Mr. Anderson has a sense of humor as well as a sense of comedy. - NY Times. A tribute to love and brotherhood in a troubled world, the play is particularly timely.